It's been a week since our last race. I want to start this post by thanking Mike Wojciechowski at Xtreme Edge Excavating for his support this past weekend! Thanks Mike!!
Heading into the weekend we were very excited, but nervous. With both qualifying shots being night sessions, we assumed the bump was going to be fast. Our game plan was to make two early shut off shots on Friday. We are working on our mid track numbers trying to run harder to get in the mid to low 3.80 range. On the first shot, I shut the car off around half track. Which turned out to be a good thing. The left side cylinder head was trying to push out a head gasket and it started to melt the head a little. On the second shot on Friday, I shut the car off at half-track again and for the second time in a row we were lucky. This time we shot out a spark plug on the right side of the motor.
Most likely, if we didn’t plan on the early shut offs, I probably wouldn’t have felt the problems and we would have ended up with some catastrophic damages. After Friday, we were optimistic about Saturday because the car is wanting to run 3.85-3.86 pretty easily and we escaped Friday night with limited damage and no oil down penalties. On Saturday for the Q3 we had the car set up to try to run a 3.86 and unfortunately on the run we broke an air fitting on the clutch management system that caused the clutch bearing to move quicker and subsequently smoked the tires. When we got back to the pit for between round service is, we found the problem. The fitting was an easy fix, but the biggest problem was going to be bleeding the management system.
Thankfully fellow competitor Luigi Novelli saved our day. This shows you that he and his crew are first class people. Luigi was going to be the car that we were going to try to bump out and without his help we wouldn’t of had that chance. Thank you very much Novelli Racing!
Unfortunately for us, mother nature had a different plan and prevented us from making the last qualifying shot. So we were left outside of the top 16 and were spectators for the rest of the weekend. Overall, we had a great time but just had a little bad luck over the weekend. We are very content with the car and the direction we are heading with it.
A big thank you to our fans for your tweets, comments on Facebook, and your presence at the track. We look forward to seeing you all in St. Louis this September!